Plan de mejora para la automatización del procesamiento de facturas en el área de Accounts Payable de Forward Air mediante UiPath

Abstract

This improvement plan was developed as a degree requirement to obtain the Bachelor's Degree in International Business, within the framework of the professional internship carried out at Lean Solutions Group, a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company that provides services to logistics companies such as Forward Air following its integration with Omni Logistics. In this context, the internship takes place within the Accounts Payable (AP) department, which is responsible for managing and processing supplier invoices for services provided to the company, ensuring that payments are executed accurately and on time across international operations.

Today, organizations operating in highly competitive global environments seek to strengthen their operational and financial processes to achieve greater efficiency, reduce costs, and ensure service quality. Digital transformation and process automation have become essential tools for achieving these objectives, as they minimize manual intervention, reduce errors, and accelerate decision-making. According to Davenport (2018), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology designed to perform structured, information-intensive digital tasks, offering one of the highest returns among artificial intelligence-related technologies due to its simplicity and relatively low implementation cost.

Within the Accounts Payable department, several challenges were identified, particularly the heavy reliance on manual processes and the frequent occurrence of errors during invoice processing. Each invoice had to be manually reviewed, interpreted, and entered into SAP Concur, the enterprise platform used to manage and control the organization's expenses and payments. This process required between eight and fifteen minutes per invoice and was highly susceptible to data entry errors. As a result, these issues generated rework, increased processing times, and delayed supplier payments, directly affecting the department's operational efficiency.

To address this problem, the proposed solution consisted of developing and implementing a UiPath robot capable of automatically reading suppliers' PDF invoices using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, extracting key information such as invoice number, amount, date, and location, and entering it directly into SAP Concur without human intervention. The robot was designed with a conditional architecture that enables it to adapt to the invoice format of each supplier. Following its deployment in a real production environment, additional improvements were made to enhance its error-handling capabilities and ensure process continuity.

Finally, this project aligns with the competencies developed throughout the International Business program, particularly in project formulation and evaluation, as well as business management, highlighting the importance of process optimization and the implementation of technological solutions to support decision-making in global business environments.